Intel NUC DN2820FYKH Bay Trail System Review

Power Consumption, System Noise and CPU Temperatures

With the Intel NUC Kit DN2820FYKH running Windows 8 the entire system was consuming just 4.6 Watts of power from the wall outlet! For the most part it was bouncing around 4-6 Watts of power at idle on the desktop. It should be mentioned that this test was done with the 8GB Kingston DDR3L memory module, Intel 802.11n wireless card installed and with the OS running on the Intel SSD.

When watching 1080P movie clips we were generally in the 8.5-9.5 Watt usage range. The Max TDP of the Intel Celeron N2820 is 7.5W with a scenario design power (SDP) of 4.5W, so we are right around where we expected to be for movie playback.

At full load the NUC was found to often peak around 12 Watts in CPU+GPU intensive applications like Futuremark 3DMark. These are very low power numbers for a desktop computer and are great for someone looking for a system that is very energy efficient. If you were looking for a basic office PC for web surfing, data entry or normal tasks this could offer huge power savings if you have 10+ systems that you are looking to replace. This also is critical to those looking to leave their PC on non-stop as energy efficiency is a big deal.

With the Intel NUC turned off we found the ambient room noise to be 31.9dB. With the system up and running on the desktop in an idle state the system was observed to be right at 38.6dB. With the NUC fully loaded running Prime95 27.9 64-bit, 3DMark or Cinebench we weren’t able to get the fan speed to increase and there was no measurable load noise difference from about 6 inches away. In a quiet room you can hear the single case fan spinning, but once you have some background noise and you can barely hear the fan slowly spinning when the NUC is running! The Intel NUC comes set to ramp up the fan at 78C, but with the room at 21C we were unable to get the NUC hot enough for the fan to kick into high gear. The top of the NUC gets warm, so let’s take a look at the temperatures.

When it comes to temperatures, we normally use Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility to monitor temperatures and voltages.The only thing is that Intel XTU does not support the Bay Trail NUC. We tried using Intel XTU v4.​3.​0.​11.

We also tried to use Intel Desktop Utilities v3.2.8.089, but again found that this Intel desktop platform was again not supported by Intel. We hope that Intel eventually supports the DH2820FYKH with Intel XTU or IDU in the future.

The only software that appeared to read the temperature correctly on the Bay Trail NUC was AIDA64. AIDA64 reported that the Intel Celeron 2820 processor idled at 0.360V with a core temperature of 35C.

We fired up 3DMark Ice Storm to put a load on both the GPU and CPU that caused the CPU Core Voltage jump up to 0.740V and the CPU Core Temperature rose to 43C. Not a bad load temperature as we weren’t too impressed by the small HSF, but it appears to be more than adequate.

Thanks for the review and insights. Definitely good as a space saver. Having wired ethernet available, I’d like to build this configuration myself. look coque galaxy note 3

KaziQ

Hi,

Something seems to be wrong with the power consumption results. My idle power consumption is at about ~11 Watts. When I disable Audio, IR Transciever and LAN it comes down to 9 Watts. 4.6 is way below anything I could see.

KaziQ

Kim Monberg

Would really have loved to know if the unit can utilize the gbit LAN port 100%, as i thought of using this one as a NAS?

Thanks Nathan for this wonderfully thorough review. This helped me make my final decision for picking one up to set up as my HTPC.

Sadly though I’m not experiencing the video performance you were demonstrating here. All of my videos are pretty standard – MKV’s and MP4’s at 1080 and 720 resolution – but none are playing smoothly so far. They are laggy and choppy, and the CPU is maxing out at 100%, as if the hardware acceleration isn’t kicking in.

Tried using Plex, VLC, MPC…. installed K-Lite…….. nothing. Performance varies between players, but none manage to do the job properly.

This is very frustrating as I have purchased this machine specifically for this purpose, and from your review it seems pretty clear that it should handle these files easily.
I was wondering if perhaps I am missing something? Any additional software I should install or setting to lookup?

Thanks!

Peter Cordes

Have you tried DISABLING hardware decode? The CPU can probably handle harder-to-decode videos than the GPU hardware. I’ve seen this with AMD and NVidia GPUs: some videos are too high bitrate for them, and they stutter.

Brett2142

Great review. I’d love to hear how this performs running the Steam Streaming beta…it should be able to do hardware decoding, if so is it powerful enough to serve as a client streaming box?

Michal

Hi Guys, I am looking for HTPC for my LG TV from 2012. I have to use PLEX server for transcoding movies from my NAS. All transfers are over gigabit home network. Plex dosen’t support HW decoding and I need pretty strong CPU. Does this NUC transcode high bit-rate 1080p 3D movies? Movies will be played by my TV set over my home network (gigabit LAN) .
If I install XBMC or simple Windows Media Player with right codecs, does this NUC is able to play high bit-rate 3D movies from my home network at my TV via HDMI?
Thanks for help in advance!

Nathan Kirsch

If you’d like to share some media with me I can try out exactly what you are looking to do. My info is on the contact page.

Adam

Thanks for the review! Do you have plans to review any Bay Trail-D motherboards that have been recently announced / released?

I would expect similar performance, but i’m particularly interested in the J1900 flavors.

Nathan Kirsch

I’ll look into it!

Joao Soares de Melo

Great review! Will this be able to do some light gaming… for example i would like to play pro evolution soccer 2014 (doesnt need to have great fps or be high quality)
Thanks

mervin39

I don’t have much experience with ssd storage our mini-pcie devices, but do you think it’d be possible to remove the wireless and replace it with a mini-pcie ssd?

Edward

Having wired ethernet available, I’d like to build this configuration myself. Wikipedia has confused me because I’ve read (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-PCIe#Mini_PCI_Express_.26_mSATA) that, while mSATA and Mini-PCIe may have the same physical form factor, the two may not necessarily be electrically compatible. At least that’s my (mis)interpretation.

have asked Gigabyte if they know what CPU they will be offering in
that system yet. It really depends on the CPU choice they make.

Intel currently offers quite a few Bay Trail-M processors in the Celeron line:

Celeron N2806
Celeron N2815
Celeron N2820
Celeron N2920
Celeron N3520

Nathan Kirsch

The fanless Gigabyte BRIX would be the J1900 Baytrail processor

will3

Nice review and at last we see the fan make & model number. There have been a lot of complaints about the noisy fan used in the D54250WYK on the Intel NUC forum you reviewed, yet never saw the fan make/model published. Any chance of letting us know if it is the same make and model number as on your Bay Trail one ?

Also, are you able to test the WiFi speed versus distance so we get a measure of how good the NUC dual antenae system is ?

Any chance of testing a range of Skype voice calls on it to see if free of stutter/dropouts ?

Your D54250WYK review erroniously listed a DDR3L part no. which Intel state is not compatible (and isn’t). Do you know if the Bay Trail NUC is as fussy as to which DDR3L sticks work ?

Nathan Kirsch

Will3 – Thanks for the feedback and I’ll take a look at the crucial DDR3L part number. I e-mailed them last night to double check.

The fans are different models. The Bay Trail-M uses a blower fan from SUNON and the Haswell NUCs use a blower fan from DELTA (model BSB05505HP). The fans are different as are the heatsinks, so there is nothing identical when it comes to cooling.

I’ve moved on to testing some other items that need to get out the door, but if I get time I’ll try to circle back and give skype a try.

Nathan Kirsch

I talked with Crucial and they said that everything is good with the DDR3L memory kit that I used in the Haswell review. “Both parts should be working just fine in the NUC “By both they mean the 2Gb density part and the newer 4Gb density “J” part (the one I have photographed and used in that review). If you have any ‘bad’ part numbers that are listed as good let me know and I’ll order a kit in to double check.

Christouf

Thanks for this test.
I’m very interested in this nuc because it’s energy efficient and silencious.
I would like to listen to music, watch videos and thanks to your test I know it’s ok.
I also would like to watch and record TV with a Usb stick, do You think that the nuc is powerfull enought for that ?
thanks for your answer and sorry for my English 😉

tonyz

I have totally depended on your reviews….Excellent Crew!

designer_boy

I was looking at using this as an always on iTunes machine. Just want to load windows 7 and have only iTunes running 24/7 for access to music files (not using video at all) Will this little box be able to handle iTunes?

How about running Plex and skype at the same time. I am still a little bit skeptical about these celeron processors running efficiently on full load and they get very unresponsive in those times.

basroil

GFLOP wise these should be as good as a Core 2 Duo laptop chip, so you would expect about the same performance. In other words, nothing spectacular, but useable in the right context

ed

A few things I’ve noticed from my own unit. As this will likely be a top search hit for the system, hopefully these will get some visibility to Intel engineers.

– It has hardware decode, for one. Just fire up mpc-hc to verify. It is true that Youtube doesn’t seem to utilize it, which is probably an issue with the graphics drivers. The revamped Intel control panel also doesn’t support rgb / ycbcr or full / limited range switching, another oversight. The 24p bug has been fixed, though.
– I found the default 3000rpm fan setting rather loud, but that’s easy to change. You can also make it completely silent.
– The BIOS still has a lot of issues. The F10 boot select screen often doesn’t work. HDMI audio doesn’t work with legacy boot enabled, though they do acknowledge this one. And at least with my unit, plugging or unplugging flash drives into the USB 3.0 slot will occasionally hard shut down the entire system, which is bonkers. Also, an attached USB mouse will turn on the system from a complete off with any slight movement, and no BIOS setting to disable.

Off the top of my head, those are the main issues. Windows 7 support is obviously a big miss at launch, but you can install an 8.1 enterprise trial until it’s sorted out. I still think it’s a solid, well-built machine and a good buy overall, if you’re not doing anything too strenuous on it.

Nathan Kirsch

Thanks for the feedback and yes they Intel engineers behind the NUC will be reading this and are aware that I bought one and was reviewing it. They sent over BIOS 0024 to try out and it did fix many of the problems I found in BIOS 0021 (BIOS 0015 was horrible). I hope when they release the next build many of the remaining issues are resolved.

As for the fan noise… It isn’t that bad, but you are right you can adjust that in the Intel Visual BIOS in a few seconds.

will3

As the case is still quite tiny, does it require any special types of SATA & Power cable to avoid overstuffing the small interior area ?

Nathan Kirsch

It does and that is why Intel includes the cables with the purchase of all of the -H SKU NUC’s that support 2.5-inch storage drives like this model (DN2820FYKH).

Paramdeo Singh

Thanks for the review and insights. Definitely good as a space saver.

Wouldn’t dream of installing Windows though, a Linux flavor would really shine on this box.

Watercooled

On the subject of hardware acceleration in Youtube, are you testing with Chrome? It seems to be broken with both HTML5 and PepperFlash, but works with the Flash plugin as it does on Firefox (and probably others, but I’ve not checked).
Right-click video>stats for nerds. In Chrome it will probably say software decode. Note: It says software *rendering* in FF embedded view, but hardware when fullscreen.
It’s been this way for quite some time now, and they don’t seem to be in any rush to fix it.